Corynne McSherry

Corynne McSherry

Legal Director

Corynne McSherry is the Legal Director at EFF, specializing in intellectual property, open access, and free speech issues. Her favorite cases involve defending online fair use, political expression, and the public domain against the assault of copyright maximalists. As a litigator, she has represented Professor Lawrence Lessig, Public.Resource.Org, the Yes Men, and a dancing baby, among others, and one of her first cases at EFF was In re Sony BMG CD Technologies Litigation (aka the "rootkit" case). In 2015 she was named one of California's Top Entertainment Lawyers. She was also named AmLaw's "Litigator of the Week" for her work on Lenz v. Universal. Her policy work includes leading EFF’s effort to fix copyright (including the successful effort to shut down the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA), promote net neutrality, and promote best practices for online expression. In 2014, she testified before Congress about problems with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Corynne comments regularly on digital rights issues and has been quoted in a variety of outlets, including NPR, CBS News, Fox News, the New York Times, Billboard, the Wall Street Journal, and Rolling Stone. Prior to joining EFF, Corynne was a civil litigator at the law firm of Bingham McCutchen, LLP. Corynne has a B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz, a Ph.D from the University of California at San Diego, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. While in law school, Corynne published Who Owns Academic Work?: Battling for Control of Intellectual Property (Harvard University Press, 2001).

Deeplinks Posts by Corynne

Just over 30 years ago, the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Sony v. Universal City Studios(usually referred to as the Sony/Betamax case), clearing the way for a technology company to sells its products (Betamaxes, and by extension, VCRs) even though they could potentially be used...

In a long-anticipated ruling, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals handed Google a clear victory today, soundly rejecting the Authors Guild’s claim that the Google Books Project infringes copyright. In the process, the Court also confirmed what we’ve always known: fair use promotes “copyright’s very purpose.” Even better, the...

Sadly, today the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the Federal Circuit’s dangerous decision in Oracle v. Google. Oracle claims a copyright on the Java Application Programming Interface (API), and that Google infringed that copyright by using certain Java APIs in the Android OS. The Federal...

Fifteen months after it issued an extraordinary order requiring Google to take down a controversial video, based entirely on a specious copyright claim, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has seen the light and rescinded that order.
Quick background: The video in question, called "Innocence of Muslims," is an...

After decades of increasingly draconian statutes and judicial decisions, our copyright system has veered far away from its original purpose. To help get copyright back on track, EFF is joining forces with a variety of groups—including libraries, industry associations, and public interest advocates—to launch a new coalition focused on promoting...

A federal judge has decisively halted the Mississippi Attorney General’s campaign of threatening to prosecute Google for refusing to remove content he finds objectionable. The court ruled in Google’s favor a few weeks ago but finally issued its complete order last Friday, March 27. The order is pretty damning...

For many months, EFF has been working with a broad coalition of advocates to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to adopt new Open Internet rules that would survive legal scrutiny and actually help protect the Open Internet. Our message has been clear from the beginning: the FCC has a...

Last week, we received some welcome news: the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) publicly confirmed that it is finally going to put its open internet rules on the right legal footing by reclassifying broadband providers as common carriers. That said, the goal was never just reclassification; that’s just an...

Well done, Team Internet. After a year of intense activism, we may have finally convinced the Federal Communications Commission to change course and craft clear, bright-line rules to protect the open internet, based on legal authority that will actually survive the inevitable legal challenge.
According to an ...